


Oneiroi

by TheSiameseMagpie



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:47:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27947786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSiameseMagpie/pseuds/TheSiameseMagpie
Summary: These are some wack dreams yo also I wrote this for one of my courses and kinda just need people to read this and tell me what ya think pls <3





	Oneiroi

“Oneiroi”

Bee gets home from work late, deliriously tired. it’s only seven in the afternoon but the sun has already set, approaching winter patterns and sinking below the horizon way earlier than he’s been accustomed to for the past few months. He throws his keys and bag down on the concrete table - they’d made it together - next to the front door and takes in the apartment. Its dark because he doesn’t want the light on but he’d know the place blind, kitchen to the left, living room to the right and between them a hallway leading to a bathroom and two bedrooms. The one on the right belongs to him, the other on the left belonged to-

He blinks that away, goes into the kitchen and stares at the contents of the fridge for three minutes before grabbing an overripe, too-soft peach from the fruit bowl on the counter instead. He eats it over the sink, letting juice drip down his hand and mouth while staring at an old stain on the side of his - _their_ \- thrifted couch.

It’s been three weeks now and things still feel weird, lofty and lethargic, like this isn’t the real world, like it didn’t happen but it did; that’s the strange thing, that it happened in the first place and he still _doesn’t understand._ He grabs his bag, tries to move to go to his room and change but he can’t bring himself to go near the hallway, to even look at it right now. Its dumb; this is dumb. He’s acting like he did in college when every new relationship was celebrated with an anniversary every week, every second week, every month. He isn’t nineteen and still fresh-faced and semantic. A three week anniversary doesn’t mean anything.

He knows this, knows it doesn’t matter but even so he hasn’t been sleeping well in his own room, like the ghost of his dead best friend haunts the walls of that room; like his body, clean and lifeless from an overdose, is still there. The thought of sleeping next to that room is horrid right now, intolerable and nauseating.

He gives in to his own cowardly exhaustion and settles for staying out here, finding comfort in the shared and neutral part of his ( _their)_ home. He washes his face and hands in the kitchen sink and strips to his boxers and t-shirt. He digs in the bottom kitchen cabinets for their stashed alcohol - “ _sippies, Bee, we use the word_ sippies _in this household"_ \- and pulls out the first thing he gets a hand around.

It’s a bottle of high-end maple whiskey, - “ _this is the gourmet shit my man_ ” - the kind Bee hated but Hads had loved. The bottle is half empty and he thinks tonight is a good night to finish it off. Whether to preserve his memory or to get rid of it, Bee doesn’t know and doesn’t think it matters.

He flops himself onto the couch, grabs a blanket thrown over an armrest, and switches the television (mildly cracked in one corner from a thrown beer bottle and a wild party) to Netflix. He finds something he can fall asleep to in a depressed stupor, an old early-2000’s TV documentary on pagan gods. The whiskey and TV remote lie on the floor next to him and for a while he lies there under the blanket and drinks from the amber bottle, one burning gulp after another. The documentary drones on and on, the narrator’s voice a poor mimicry of that Attenborough guy from Planet Earth but it has a similarly calming effect on his brain. He stays awake for a drawling lecture about major gods and only begins to really lull towards sleep once the film gets to minor gods.

With alcohol warm in his throat and belly, he begins to slip under on the tail end of this and, even falling into sleep, intoxicated and hurting, his mind grabs on to the last bits of false-Attenborough’s irritating and silky voice-

“ _The Oneiroi, deities of nightmares and dreams... unnamed and often in the form of animals... could offer insights to the soul... messengers and portents, harbingers of possibilities, grim omens..._ ”

He falls asleep, and dreams.

///

“... ** _Bellal_** _..._ ”

A voice calling his name, his _full name_ , sounding not unlike the rasping laughter of a nervous hyena, is what stirs him. Its soft yet uncomfortably nearby; nervous or not, a hyena is still a predator.

He obeys the beckoning hand of the dream and awakens.

He lays curled on his side, a nest of what smells like plant matter shielding him from whatever the voice belonged to.

When he opens his eyes, he finds he can’t see himself in the dark particularly well, can only see the ghostly blurred shapes of his folded hands in front of him illuminated by faint blue light.

It takes him another second to realize he’s quite possibly naked, if the merciless chill on his back and flanks are anything to go by. He knows this is strange but doesn’t remember why, doesn’t remember that clothes are something people tend to expect and appreciate on their bodies for reasons other than keeping warm. He awakens as himself instead, unbothered by the exposure if a bit uncomfortable and jarred by the cold.

He turns his head upwards, away from its nestled position against his hands and sees the gaping mouth of a wide cavern above him through the overhanging limbs of his nest of flora. It feels, at least from what he can see, close enough to just brush his fingertips against, but in actuality is probably more like the distorted, endless horizon of an evening sky seen through intoxicated eyes. Jagged groves line the walls and cascade up to the ceiling, coated and thick with a glistening, subtly luminous material. He can faintly see gaps of light in the walls, slight, bare spaces where the light doesn’t properly conform to inner walls that lead deep into even deeper caverns. The air is humid but very cool, and the overall effect of the place is oddly grotesque.

Whoever it was that spoke is silent now, so he props himself up on an unsteady and aching arm. Further inspection reveals the cave to be even larger than he first thought and plant life overwhelmingly consumes a hidden floor. Even the plants emit a soft, bioluminescent light that daintily illuminates this massive, enclosed hole in the ground.

He sits up further, eyes shooting about cautiously, and with no small amount of pain settles himself in a seated position, legs bent out in front of him and arms curled inward around himself, rather like a wounded bird. His joints feel like they’ve been folded in on themselves for weeks. For a few minutes, hours, whatever, he simply sits there, pale and fragrant, a single gardenia flower gradually wilting in a bed of moss and weeds and ferns.

He feels it before it happens, but all at once the dream is disturbed, a presence like a poltergeist forcing its way into the cool gullet of the cavern, a jagged needle between the dermis layers of smooth, porcelain skin.

From the ground in front of him the serpent erupts, massive in bulk and length, endlessly streaming up out of the broken ground like a geyser of pearlescent oil, dirt and earth staining his skin where earth and organic matter are flung up from the ground on the serpents way up, up up. It continues to fill up the cavern’s ceiling, its head motionless as it stares down at him, a wolf curious and expectant of scraps before it decides to take its own.

Staring the serpent in mirthful, menacing gold eyes and panting from fear, he waits, petrified.

The beast above him cocks its head and opens its mouth. He hears that voice again, except its nothing like the cowardly huffs of a frightened hyena this time and rather more like the rumbled cackle of an ancient and better left undisturbed god before it pulls you into its own version of hell.

“ ** _What gets bigger_** _”,_ and he recoils at the sound of _its_ voice, “ ** _the more you take away?_** ”

He scrambles back because he doesn’t think he’s ever heard anything so awful, like the sound water makes when it freezes over instantly, a chest deep cry, like the breaking of glass, like a woman’s horrified scream, the blare of bomb sirens, the rumbling of an earthquake or the howling of arctic wind, all of these things at once.

It rumbles that horrid cackle again and descends, a geyser of gold eyes and slick night peaking and falling on him. He closes his eyes, and the dream falls away and leaves him falling into an ocean of blank void beneath him.

Falling and falling, the dream takes him somewhere else now, blessedly far away from the serpent. He awakes on his side again, a robe of slick night the only thing loosely covering him and he doesn’t bother tying it. He doesn’t remember why he should and again this thought seems out of place in his mind, but it doesn’t _feel_ wrong. He almost wants to shrug it off but a strong gust of wind smelling like rotting flowers convinces him otherwise.

The dream beckons him, a flash of bright light piercing his eyelids in his peripheral.

He obeys and opens his eyes to see he’s in the center of a massive hall. Like the cavern from before, the walls seem to span up and up forever but here the walls are military cemetery straight, vertical and horizontal lines perfect, unsettling in their perfection. He gets to his feet on sturdy legs this time and looks around to see he’s standing on a platform, a mesa of black stone glinting with white, like marble carved from an alien planet. The mesa narrows itself and leads up a bridge to another vaulted mesa, higher than the one he stands on. He hears fluttering, like the dry rasp of insect wings and finds the source when he looks up at the platform.

On it stands a bull, light reflecting off of it from an unknown source, light that doesn’t seem to illuminate any other part of the room but the bull. It looks like it could be carved from opal, its skin white and transparent but its visible insides a nebula of color, not at all vibrant but striking enough against the pale shade of white to be noticeable. The bull itself is fucking _daunting_. He’d wager a guess at a hundred feet tall, but nevertheless it looks practically puny in comparison to the hall itself.

The fluttering comes from a swarm of small, thin, red (he thinks) objects lulling and swirling gracefully around the bull, under its belly, around a crown of monstrous horns, between muscled legs and under a tail, the appendage held in the air as though it had been frozen mid-swish. He walks towards the bull, the whispering of an ancient god echoing in the hall. He walks closer and closer, close enough now that he can tentatively identify the cascading objects as rose petals perhaps, dancing consciously and animatedly like a flock of starlings evading an ambitious falcon.

He’s moved close enough now that he can reach out a hand and touch the intimidatingly muscled ankle of the bull’s foreleg, tensed with unreleased energy. The opal skin is smooth, cool to the touch but somehow textured when disturbed, feeling under his palm like the velvet covering a stag’s antlers days before a violent and bloody shedding.

The swarm of flowers flies near him, close enough for a few petals to just barely brush his cheek and he gasps at the satiny feeling. As soon as the sound leaves his mouth the rose petals come to an erupt halt midair, frozen like the bull’s tail but-

He feels movement under his hand, hears a sharp cracking like the breaking of an iced over lake in the middle of winter. The cool, velvety leg under his palm moves and tenses, little flecks of opal dust released into the air with the movement of something large enough to shadow the space around him. Icy cold breath washes over him and he knows the bull has turned its head down and towards him. He looks up, another waft of cold air (he knows it should be warm and it feels _wrong_ that it isn’t) blowing over him, ruffling his hair, the robe, the soft downy hairs on his exposed skin. Bright white eyes stare at him from a wide-set bovine face. The horned crown, regally perched on an intimidating network of muscles and sinew, is now on full display to him.

A massive and cold yet oddly furred snout bumps against his stomach, and when this beast speaks to him it isn’t anything like the serpent. It seems like the bull’s voice, soft and wispy instead of dark and awful, comes from the rose petals instead, which vibrate and sway all around him, held in a tense state of limbo.

_“ **What must be broken** ”, _the flower petals whisper all around him, trembling, “ ** _before it can be fixed?_** _”_

And before he knows it the petals begin dropping rapidly towards the ground above him, as though gravity itself decided to annihilate any illusion of natural laws existing in this place. Except, when they fall to the floor of the mesa around him they _shatter,_ the petals morphing from soft, organic material into brittle glass. Broken shards of deep red explode up at him from the ground where the petals impact, jagged edges shooting and cutting into his bare skin where the robe doesn’t cover him. He can only react with a severe flinch and breathy gasp of shock and pain, an arm raising instinctively to cover his eyes.

The cuts don’t feel deep but they must be because soon enough he’s dripping with blood, spilling and pooling onto the floor, ruby liquid (more red than the roses, he thinks with delirious pride) running down gradually paling skin and wetting the robe. He staggers, feeling lightheaded and bracing his hand on the bull’s leg. He can feel where a few shards are lodged in his skin and the produced image makes him want to hurl. He gasps for air, trying not to move too much.

Above him, the bull rumbles a growl deep in its opal chest and bumps its snout against his stomach again (glass shards digging _in_ ), and he topples backwards to the floor and falls through it as if it were water this whole time instead of solid ground. The water, vacuum, air, whatever it is, it’s dark and opaque when he sinks under it.

He falls slowly for what seems like seconds or maybe days, time imperceivable in this strange state of lucid dreaming.

When the dream allows him to surface again, he’s lying on his back. He opens his eyes but the first thing he notices is the smell of this place, musty, cool, wet, borderline rotting. He looks down at himself and notices he’s yet again unclothed; even the robe is gone this time, a casual courtesy the bull must have provided. The cuts are gone but the blood remains, curiously.

He sits up and looks around. This time it’s a cathedral, massive and towering. The bite of winter temperatures seeping in through broken stained glass windows and shrinking wood, yet somehow the outside world is... imperceivable. The barely-there light has to be coming from _somewhere_ , but there isn’t any kind of kinetic warmth or noise outside of the church associated with secular existence. The ceiling is lined with rafters coated in white bird crap, at least from what Bee can tell from his spot on the floor. From here, the ceiling seems oppressively shrouded in the kind of darkness that belongs in a galactic black hole rather than anywhere resembling earth. Moonlight streams in from outside, creating opaque pockets of darkness, gaps and obstacles preventing the light from fully reaching parts of the floors and walls.

The cathedral is empty of tables and pews, but a lone organ stands against the back wall of the building facing the entrance, raised from the main floor on a staged platform. An ashen layer of dust covers every surface. He looks behind himself and sees a large blank wall facing the raised platform with the organ where a door _ought_ to be. The space for it is there, like it’s supposed to be there but somehow isn’t.

He sighs softly and stands slowly, carefully; something about this place tells him that the air here is fragile, like too loud of a noise will shatter the mirage all around him. He stands there, waiting, waiting for... _anything_ to happen, really, if the past two dreams are anything to go by. Time stands still, even the air itself unwilling to move too quickly and interrupt the moment, except-

He suddenly feels like he’s being watched; for the first time since this odd sequence of dreams began he wishes he had actual clothing on, something thick and dark that covered his pale, lithe frame from unwanted and preying eyes.

Piercing in his ears and making him gasp with shock, a chord from the organ shakes the shambling cathedral. He spins around towards it and sees some sort of shape ambling across the keys of the organ, notes eerily climbing higher and higher with every step the entity takes. Its body moves like liquid, slender and languid across the uneven surface, and the escalating, jagged sound would be mildly amusing if not for the now ominous atmosphere of the building, malice implied in auras.

The thing slinks into a large beam of moonlight coming from a gap in the ceiling, but even so he can only see the vague outline of a small, black four-legged animal with angular ears, a tail, and bright, pale pink eyes that look directly at him.

He doesn’t know why but the interruption of the silence feels _wrong_ , and apparently the building vehemently agrees. The wooden cathedral begins to creak and groan, temperatures dropping and making goosebumps break out across his skin. He wraps his arms around himself, watching the air from his breath fog up in front of him. Movement from the organ catches his attention again and he stares warily at the animal as it hops off the organ’s keyboard, walks toward him across the stage, and off of it in agile, limber movements; he can see something pale in its mouth. It’s pink eyes are luminous and mesmerizing.

It walks closer, closer, and with every step it seems to grow _larger_ in the shadows, morphing and bleeding into the darkness. It’s in the shape of a cat, he thinks, when the form is solid long enough for him to tell. The willowy, feline body is unmistakable now that its larger. As it prowls closer to him he can see that the pale shape in its mouth is a dead white bird, feathers stained red and dripping with blood. _Like me_ , his own mind disturbingly supplies, and he wonders if the blood still lingering on him makes him smell like prey to the cat. Pearly white fangs hook around the dove’s body and equally pearly white claws flex from the cat’s paws with each step its takes towards him.

“What- what do you want?” he says, trying to make his voice steady despite the mounting chill of the place. His voice breaks on the first word, from the chill, disuse, or escalating nerves he doesn’t know. It doesn’t answer, simply keeps stalking towards him slowly, growing larger and larger, the size of a horse now. Shadows follow it. He walks backwards until his naked back hits the doorless wooden wall. It only stops once its face is directly in front of his, enthralling pale pink eyes level with his. The dove is no longer in its mouth (swallowed, no doubt), but bloody white feathers hang from its jaws. He can smell the iron and copper of it.

“Stay-“ his protest is interrupted by a thundering purr coming from the beast’s chest but he gathers himself to try again, to speak over it, “stay awa-”

“ ** _The more of me there is, the less of yourself you see_** ”, its mouth doesn’t move but he can hear the words echoing loudly around the cathedral. “ ** _What am I, Bellal?_** _”_

He huffs, “I don’t understand, that doesn’t make any sense.”

The giant cat flicks an ear, pale pink eyes twinkling at him with something like amused ferocity. Around them, the cathedral continues to creak like it’s in agony and the chill of the place has gotten worse. Unlike the bull, the cat’s proximity exudes heat and a warmth that’s tempting to bury his hands and face into, considering the unrelenting winter of the cathedral.

“ ** _What am I?_** ” it says again, its mouth unmoving but the words loud enough to be almost deafening. “ ** _What am I? What am I? What am I?_** ” it bellows, over and over again.

In a panic he covers his ears and screams back at it, “I DON’T KNOW, FUCK, SHUT UP!”

He swipes a bunched fist at the beast and it snarls, bloody and feathered muzzle peeling back to expose a mouthful of wicked fangs. It lunges for him, close enough to him already that a small, strong jump with raised paws (unsheathed claws, sparkling in the moonlight, digging into his ribs) brings its mouth directly on his throat and he can feel the moment its teeth sink into his _fucking neck_ -

///

He awakes screaming, flailing his arms and kicking the blanket off of himself trying to fend off the beast. He still feels massive hooked claws digging into his sides and fangs like spears thrusting into his neck. He cups his hands around his throat and shudders, panting.

“What the actual _fuck_ -”

He’s trembling violently, his t-shirt and boxers soaked with cold sweat and his head is pounding. Nausea licks up his throat and the dreams-

Fuck, _those dream_ s.

He barely remembers what the beasts told him, the memory of it all slipping away if he doesn’t concentrate on it enough, but what they told him, those riddles; weren’t they riddles? They’d sounded like riddles-

**_What gets bigger_** , and he remembers it all now, a crash and a roar, _**the more you take away**_ **?**

**_What must be broken_** , rose petals, his own blood spilling, _**before it can be fixed**_ **?**

**_The more of me there is_** , pale pink eyes, a dead dove, **_the less of yourself you see. What am I_?**

On the television in front of him the segment on minor gods – _Oneiroi_ – is somehow still going even though the dream felt like it went on for hours instead of what must have been less than ten minutes. The narrator’s voice is still overly dramatic but now significantly more threatening than it had been before-

“ _\- was often said that mortals visited by these deities were in desperate need of guidance, in whatever form the Oneiroi thought to give it..._ ”


End file.
